Gemma

The novel is narrated by Helen, a sixty-one-year-old nonfiction professor who is being pushed into early retirement after more than thirty years at a New York university. The novel unfolds largely over the final night Helen spends clearing out her office, but her discovery of an old book causes the narrative to move repeatedly into the past. Through these memories, she attempts to understand her intense friendship with Gemma Fields, a brilliant and volatile poet who abruptly removed Helen from her life fifteen or sixteen years earlier. Interwoven with Helen’s recollections is most of a fictional cult novella called A Foreign Language, whose story of a husband, wife and male lover appears to contain a message Gemma once wanted Helen to understand.

Gemma was famous unusually young. She published chapbooks at seventeen and eighteen, received an NEA grant at twenty-one and was nominated for a National Book Award at twenty-five. She nevertheless regarded the nomination as a failure rather than an achievement and stopped publishing poetry for several years. At twenty-eight, already far more accomplished than most of her teachers, she entered the MFA programme at Helen’s university. She was notoriously confrontational, recycling previously published poems in workshops to expose the unreliability of her classmates’ judgements and verbally dismantling the writers her professors admired. Helen was fascinated by the force of Gemma’s intelligence and by her capacity to change how other people read.

Helen worked in nonfiction rather than poetry and never formally taught Gemma. They met through Elisa, a biologist Helen was casually dating. Elisa was the daughter of the famous poet Rhoda Homer, who had effectively incorporated Gemma into her wealthy family. At Rhoda’s crowded bookstore reading, Gemma introduced Helen to her by announcing that Helen was sleeping with Elisa, then added a graphic comment about Elisa’s orgasms. The incident was humiliating, but it also established Gemma as someone who would violate any social boundary merely to expose the awkwardness beneath it.